in this world, and we wrapped his ragged hesp around him for a winding-sheet, and left him with Christ, who so graciously took the cumber of Rutherford’s ill-ravelled life also.  Young men whose hesp still runs even, and whose web is not yet torn, as Rutherford says to Earlston, ’Make conscience of your thoughts and study in everything to mortify your lusts.  Wash your hands in innocency, and God, who knoweth what you have need of before you ask Him, will Himself lead you to encompass His holy altar, and thus to enter the harbour of a holy home and an unravelled life.’

Rutherford’s Letters are all gleaming with illustrations, some homely enough, like the ill-ravelled hesp, and some classically beautiful, like the arrow that has gone beyond the bowman’s mastery.  Writing to young Lord Boyd about seeking Christ in youth, and about the manifold advantages of an early and a complete conversion, Rutherford says:  ’It is easy to set an arrow right before the string is drawn, but when once the arrow is in the air the bowman has lost all power over it.’  Look around at the men and women beside you and see how true that is.  Look at those whose arrow is shot, and see how impossible it is for them, even when they wish it, either to call their arrow back or to correct its erring flight.  And thank God that you are still in your youth, and that the arrow of your future life is not yet shot.  And while your arrow still lies trembling on the string be sure your face is in the right direction and your aim well taken.  Rutherford, with all his experience and all his frankness and all his eloquence, could not tell his young correspondents half the advantages of an early conversion.  Nor can I tell you half of the changes for good that would immediately take place in you with an early, immediate, and complete conversion.  Perhaps the very first thing some of you would do would be to get a new minister and to join a new church.  Then on the week-day some of you would at once leave your present business, and seek a new means of livelihood in which you could at least keep your hands and your conscience clean.  Then you would choose a new friend and a new lover, or else you would get God to do for them what He has been so good as to do for you, give them a new heart with which to weave their hesp and shoot their arrow.  You would read new books and new journals, or, else, you would read the old books and the old journals in a new way.  The Sabbath-day would become a new day to you, the Bible a new book, and your whole future a new outlook to you;—­but why particularise and specify, when all old things would pass away, and all things would become new?  Oh dear young men of Edinburgh, and young men come up to Edinburgh to get your bow well strung and your arrow well winged, look well before you let go the string, for, once your arrow is shot, you cannot recall it so as to take a second aim.  With an early and a complete conversion you would have the advantage also of having your whole